"Sandman" TV Series in Development, Fans in Crisis

Yesterday evening, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Warner Brothers Television is in the process of acquiring the rights to Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman," with the intent of adapting the comic into a series. Development is only in the earliest stages, but "Supernatural" showrunner Eric Kripke is reportedly in talks to helm the project. Fan reaction has been mixed to say the least, ranging from ecstatic to hostile, but the general vibe I've been getting is skepticism. And it's no wonder. Looking at Warner Brothers Television's recent production credits, there are a lot of genre shows like "Supernatural," "Chuck," "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," "Fringe," and "V," which provides a good idea of the kind of "Sandman" show we could probably expect from them - a slick network action program with genre flourishes, sanitized and safe for mainstream consumption. In other words, an absolute waste of the material's potential.

Full disclosure time. "The Sandman" is my favorite comic series, the one that got me reading comics regularly during the 90s. It's the only series to date that I've collected, the only series I went out and bought ancillary merchandise for. It launched DC's Vertigo imprint for comics aimed at older readers in 1989, won mountains of accolades including a World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story in 1991 (the rules were then promptly changed so that no comic could ever win in the category again), and attracted a large readership of people who didn't normally read comics like women and high-brow academics. By the time I picked it up in college, "Sandman" volumes had found their way into the curriculum for English classes. It remains one of the most popular and influential comics in recent memory, and is very high on the list of properties that comics fans have long waited to see adapted for the screen, along with "Preacher" and "The Dark Knight Returns."

It's not hard to see why Warners wants to move on "Sandman" now, after years of stalled film and television projects. "Sandman" is about the nature of dreams, specifically Dream, the anthropomorphic personification of dreaming who is also known as Lord Morpheus, or the Sandman. He's one of the seven Endless who manage and embody the primary forces of the universe. The others, his siblings, include Destiny, Desire, Despair, Delirium, Destruction, and his favorite older sister, Death. Gaiman penned seventy-some issues devoted to their adventures, mostly following Dream's attempts to sort out longstanding personal and familial problems, but also dozens of one-shot stories where the Endless are only peripherally involved. It's tempting to point to the success of "Inception," which was also about dreams, as the primary motivator here, but I think Warners is really interested in the more Gothic, female-friendly aspects of "Sandman" that might draw in the "Twilight" and "True Blood" crowd.

However there's already a a lot of discontent being voiced by the fanbase, and many have made it clear that they do not want a "Sandman" series on network television. I agree wholeheartedly. The "Sandman" comics are emphatically adult material, best classified as a horror title during its early days, though soon branching out into fantasy and historical fiction. You could tone down the gory bits and still retain most of the impact of the stories, but I'm more worried about what network execs would make of the religious themes, the GLBT characters, the portrayal of the mentally ill, and the storyline about the serial killer convention. A smaller budget wouldn't be a dealbreaker, since plenty of good genre shows have figured out how to work around limited special effects and geographical constraints. Many of the best "Sandman" installments like "The Sound of Her Wings" and "Three Septembers and a January" wouldn't be any more complicated to film than an episode of "Law & Order." On the other hand, you'd almost certainly lose others like "Ramadan" and "Hob's Leviathan."

But by far the biggest problem is the stifling creative culture of the major networks, which are extremely risk averse and resistant to presenting challenging, unorthodox material. And there's little that's more challenging or unorthodox than "Sandman," which is about as far away from a standard superhero comic as you can get. Even if you minimized the fantasy elements, cut the frequent jaunts across space and time, and jettisoned the one-shot stories, "Sandman" would still look like nothing else on network television. There's no simple formula of cases to solve or monsters to fight. Romance is not romanticized, and never ends well. There's no great ongoing conspiracy or mystery to untangle. To produce a "Sandman" show with any kind of faithfulness to its source, the creators would have to be willing to do without many standard formulas and conventions, and resist the pressure to reduce the stories to more mainstream-palatable pabulum. It's not impossible with a network production, but it's a hell of a lot less likely. And even if Eric Kripke or someone else managed to create a good "Sandman" television series without compromising the material, it would likely flounder on network primetime due to its difficult hero, complex themes, and intellectual bent.

Cable is the obvious home for a "Sandman" television project. AMC, HBO, Showtime, and Starz aren't afraid of catering to niche audiences and have set the standard for quality television over the past few years. Among the genre shows they're currently developing are the zombie thriller "The Walking Dead," the high fantasy "A Game of Thrones," and the sword-and-sandals mini-epic, "Spartacus: Gods of the Arena." If "Sandman" were on cable, there would be fewer restrictions on its content and subject matter, it would have more time to build an audience, and it would be more likely to get away with conceits like having the occasional stand-alone episode tell us the story of "Dream of a Thousand Cats" or "A Midsummer Night's Dream." If the creators wanted to get really ambitious, they might even try to change the style and design of the show for various storylines, the way the comics switched artists every time it finished a story arc. A full-blown "Sandman" television series with the right people involved has so much potential, far more than a simple movie or three could provide.

It's still very early in the process and nobody is actually attached to "Sandman" yet, so it's impossible to predict how this will play out. The THR article suggests that nothing will move forward without the participation of Neil Gaiman, who at the time of writing hasn't said a word about the new series. It may just be wishful thinking. There have been a lot of similar comics projects announced with similar fanfare that are still stuck in development hell, like "Preacher" and "Fables," so that's where I expect this latest one is going to end up. And if it does, it'll be no small relief. As with all adaptations, I'd love to see a good version, but at the same time I utterly dread a bad one. The "Sandman" comics are so amazing as they are, I don't see how television or film could improve on them.